Mission History

China Christian Council and Amity Foundation

Lutheran mission work in China has a long and exciting history. American Lutheran missionaries first went to China in 1890. During the next several decades, hundreds of missionaries went to several different parts of China. After 1910, there was increasing cooperation between Lutheran mission groups, and seminaries, a university, publication house, and other church institutions were established and began to flourish despite disturbances due to political tensions.

At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, Lutheran missionaries came from Germany, Northern Europe and the United States. In northern China, and in the provinces of Shandong, Shanxi, Henan, Hebei, Hunan and Guangdong, they established churches, schools and hospitals. The Lutheran Church of China was born in 1920. It was a loosely federated general body stretching from Canton in the south to Manchuria in the northeast, and was still growing toward maturity when Communist control of the mainland cut it off from Lutheran world fellowship in 1951. At that time there were over 100,000 baptized members, 1,250 places of worship, 180 Chinese pastors, and over 1,000 lay workers. At the height of missionary activity, more than 600 missionaries representing Lutherans from Europe and North America were at work in China.

After 1951, the Lutheran Church in China joined the government-approved "Three-Self Movement," and its activities were restricted to worship in the strictest sense. Christians in China were not allowed to communicate with the West, and no one outside China knew what was happening. Then, during the Cultural Revolution (1966 to 1979), all religious activity in China was outlawed, and Christian congregations only survived in small house groups.